Mushrooms lead to a career change

HAW RIVER — Four years after a layoff with two start-ups under his belt, Eric Dunlap can’t afford to sit still.

There are mushrooms to harvest. There are salsa and pickles to be cooked, canned, labeled and delivered to grocers around the state. And, more recently, there are hefty medical bills to pay.

Dunlap barely has time to enjoy his self-reliance or newfound sense of satisfaction at running two businesses from his Haw River home.

“There’s no safety net. You have to produce or perish,” he said Friday.

Dunlap, 52, stumbled upon both Mushrooms-n-More Inc. — for which he grows and sells shiitake mushrooms — and his Dogwood Hill brand of products out of chance.

On Oct. 31, 2008, he was laid off from his position as marketing director with a shipping firm. The economy looked especially grim then and he realized his age and skill set limited his employment options.

In January 2009, he happened across an article in one of his wife, Amy’s, magazines about a program at N.C. A&T teaching farmers how to cultivate shiitake mushrooms. He bit and enrolled in the course, sawing up oak logs to be inoculated with the shiitake spores.

Growing mushrooms sounds easy enough. Just make sure you have somewhere dark, damp and warm to grow them. Shiitakes are a little more finicky than many ’shrooms, it turns out. It has to be just the right amounts of dark, damp and warm — at just the right times — to urge them to grow.

Shiitakes typically grow between August and October, Dunlap said. He had to figure out how to trick the mushrooms into growing the other nine months of the year.

“Any fool can grow mushrooms in summertime. Only a fool tries to grow mushrooms in wintertime,” he said.

He likened the learning process to putting together a jigsaw puzzle. He had to learn how to soak the logs, how to stack them, how to rest them and how hot to keep them.

It’s taken him three years to perfect his winter-growing system. He converted a barn into a two-room sweat lodge for the inoculated logs. The air inside assaults your senses with a musty heat and the pungent, earthy smell of rot.

Outside, he keeps about 1,500 logs, covered and stacked in rows. They have to sit up to nine months before they’ll produce. He rotates them through “the fruiting process,” drying them, soaking them and forcing growth inside the barn.

Nearly all of his mushrooms go into the kitchens and dishes of Triad and Triangle restaurants.

He visits the barn at 6:30 each morning to check for mushrooms.

“That’s the happiest part of my day, seeing how many have budded,” Dunlap said. “There’s a real sense of accomplishment. A sense that I created it.”

During that first year, left waiting for the shiitakes to bud, he began filling his 5 1/2 acres with 300 tomato plants, a dozen rows of cucumbers and about 50 pepper plants. He sold what he could at farmer’s markets but was left with an overabundance of produce.

They decided to make pickles, based on Amy Dunlap’s refrigerator-pickle recipe, and salsa. Dunlap tinkered with the pickle recipe for a cooked bread and butter pickle that could be stored at room temperature. The salsa recipe took weeks to perfect.

He unveiled the Dogwood Hill products in spring of 2010. Those products are now in eight North Carolina Fresh Markets, two Whole Foods locations, co-op grocery stores in Burlington, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Pittsboro and Charlotte and “a lot of mom-and-pops,” Dunlap said. He’s in the process of getting those products on the shelves at other regional chains and stores.

As if losing his job and struggling to get his footing in the agricultural and retail worlds weren’t enough, the universe had one more hurdle for him to clear. It was a big one.

By late 2010, he began noticing his hips and legs aching, especially late at night. He chalked it up to all the hard physical labor he was doing and the natural process of getting older. The days he didn’t have to push himself physically, his legs hurt less.

His phone rang at 7:30 a.m. the day after his routine checkup. It was his doctor. His white blood cell count was high. Weeks of tests followed before he was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia.

Doctors told him the cancer shouldn’t be fatal but must be treated with chemotherapy in pill form every day for the rest of his life.

“This is the devil I dance with,” Dunlap said, producing a sheet of red pills he takes twice a day.

For the first month, the drugs robbed him of his energy. He simply couldn’t farm or pack or ship. His body gradually worked up a tolerance to the harsh chemotherapy drugs but other side effects on his gastro-intestinal system called for more medications.

He’s been in remission for 11 months.

Despite the difficulties, Dunlap kept his dry sense of humor and a practical outlook on life. He shrugged his shoulders and explained how he had to keep going, had to provide for his family and had to create his own job.

“It’s been a challenge of creating a business, growing a business and overcoming time away from that business for doctor’s office visits. And paying medical bills on much less than I made before,” Dunlap said. “But I’ve caught a break here and there: from a kind soul at Fresh Market and other good people. And a good doctor.”